Saturday, May 27, 2023

Veterans In Memoriam

 On the very first Vietnam draft  lottery, my number came up 349. So I was not drafted. But many of my generation did go to that war and serve our country. My neighborhood buddy Johnny joined and went. He was one of the lucky soldiers who didn’t have to make their return in a coffin. 

But 282,000 Americans were killed there.  On this Memorial Day, we honor them.

I published my novel, King of Soul, in 2017. It’s a story about what happened to our nation during that war. In honor of those dead soldiers and other personnel who did not make it back home, here’s a snippet from chapter 13. The setting is a battlefield in Vietnam, where we hear where we find what they were up against, and we hear:

       The sound of a chopper.

       Craig grabbed the radio and dashed to the center of the LZ. He heard a human voice coming out of the radio, “. . .was that you, Black Box Two-Niner?” 

        He saw the helicopter. Craig waved his arms like there was no tomorrow. 

        “Is it a hot LZ?” the voice asked in crackling, fucking miraculous splendor.

        “It’s pretty damn warm.”

        “Get ready,” came the reply.

        The H-34 dropped out of sight beyond a hill. A few eternal moments later, the big lovable green insect came a-flyin’, swooping down low over the mountain of the shadow of death. MARINES was painted on its tail. The blessed bird flared and hovered above those stumps that had earlier been trees.  And then there he —the  United States by-God Marine leaped out while his gunner buddy on the chopper kept up the fire cover. Green tracers whizzed all over the damned place, some of them whacking the skin and the glass of the chopper. 

         Craig was the last of the walking dead nine soldiers to get aboard. And so they were able—by  the grace of God and the fierce determination of them US by-God Marines—able to hover the hell out of there. And we were grateful. But we didn’t know it yet, because we could never really know, never truly understand nor appreciate,  all that he and his men had done that day: all the hell and high ordnance they had eluded that day, and just how perilously close that day was to being the big chill for them, so damned close to requiring of them their last full measure of devotion. And the appreciation that would later be  shown to them was cast into the shadow of a gray granite wall in Washington DC, but that was to come much later. 

VNMem

In my generation, we have a unique memory that recalls not only the tragedy of that war and the grief of our friends and family members whose friends, sons and daughters, never returned.  We also pause in gratitude to those Americans—especially the soldiers— who died in all the wars and battles that have ever been fought on behalf of assuring the peace and safety of our United States of America.

This memorial day, I also remember and appreciate those law enforcement officers who were overwhelmed to the point of death in their defence of our Capitol on January 6, 2021:

Brian Sicknick and Howard Liebengood of the Capitol Police.

Jeffrey Smith and Kyle Defreytag of the DCMetro Police

Gunther Hashida, with Emergency ResponseTeam

Ashli Babbitt, USAF veteran

King of Soul

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